Jamin Brophy-Warren writes about New Super Mario Bros for the Wii.
And refers to some of my thoughts from A Casual Revolution, on playing to win vs. playing to keep the game interesting vs. playing to manage the social consequences:
“Jesper Juul, a video-game researcher and professor at NYU’s newly minted Game Center, argues that multiplayer games give us three things to balance. Players want to win and they want the game to be fair, but they also need to navigate whatever relationships they have outside the game – that is, if you shoot your friend in the head in Call of Duty, you’ll have to answer for that in the offline world. My brother and the jerk from E3 were solely concerned with winning. I mostly cared about the game being fair. None of us, though, sat down and talked about the third factor – what we were planning to do during our journey as in-game teammates.”